Understanding fatness in the public sphere of young students: social representations and emotional response

Abstract

This study examines how youth collectively represent fatness and determines the emotions it arouses. Understanding how fatness is socially constructed by young people is crucial to create programs that better deal with it. A free association exercise elicited by the word "fatness" was answered by 200 people of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (Spain), and the content was analyzed by its lexicon using Alceste software. The results showed that health-related representation of fatness was mostly descriptive, and it was not connected to risky or any emotional response. But fatness was also completely represented as a social pressure issue related to stigmatization and highly correlated with negative emotions, such as sadness, insecurity, embarrassment, anguish, lonesomeness, pity or anger. That is, risky and negative emotions were linked to social non-acceptance, and not with health problems. Thus, the conclusion is that fatness is transmitted from fear and not from a positive construction of the health.

Mental and emotional representations of “weight loss”: free-word association networks in members of bariatric surgery-related social media communities

“…This observation complements the findings of a previous free-word association study in the context of obesity, in which healthy students had to provide their impressions on fatness. Surprisingly, they linked the fatness-related bad feelings with social pressure rather than with the health or selfcomfort of the people with obesity [23].…”

Representações Sociais da Obesidade e Magreza entre Pessoas com Obesidade

“…Os três eixos presentes nas Representações Sociais da obesidade indicam que tais representações estão ancoradas nos aspectos negativos que são propagados cotidianamente sobre a obesidade e os padrões de beleza vigentes, e que compõem o imaginário social a respeito do fenômeno. A obesidade considerada como doença (Collipal & Godoy, 2015;Justo & Camargo, 2017;Justo et al, 2018), relacionada ao preconceito e à discriminação (Araújo, Coutinho, Alberto, et al, 2018;Araújo, Coutinho, Araújo-Morais, et al, 2018;Koelzer et al, 2016) e ligada à problemas de autoestima e tristeza (Mondragon & Txertudi, 2018) faz parte do imaginário social sobre a obesidade, tanto entre pessoas obesas como não obesas.…”

“…A obesidade é considerada uma doença (Collipal & Godoy, 2015), um desvio . Está relacionada a emoções negativas como tristeza, insegurança, vergonha, ansiedade, pena e raiva (Mondragon & Txertudi, 2018), portanto, deve ser combatida (Justo & Camargo, 2017).…”